SEX, SHAME, AND BAREBACKING

Before feminism, efforts to prevent pregnancy out of wedlock among heterosexuals involved a campaign of guilt and shame, primarily directed against women. From an early age, girls were taught to feel ashamed of their sexual urges and to feel guilty if they acted on them. Similarly, gay men have been shamed and guilted into denying their sexual feelings for other men, and social censorship, which we often refer to as “homophobia,” has served to keep gay men confused, ashamed, and disconnected from an intrinsic aspect of themselves in an attempt to suppress homosexual behavior. Walt Odets (1994) believes that relying on shame and guilt to ensure that gay men practice safer sex is doomed to failure because those same psychological armaments have rarely been effective in keeping gay men from homosexual behavior and “have never been effective in changing feelings.” He writes: “This exploitation is equally unlikely to keep gay men from having unprotected sex, or thinking about it, or having complex feelings about it”.

What about gay men who were not on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic? Do they also feel shame about barebacking? Their attitudes toward unsafe sex are addressed by author and activist Patrick Moore, who believes that younger gay men have also suffered losses as a result of AIDS, even if those losses were not of lovers and friends. “For men of my generation [those who came of age sexually after the onset of AIDS], there was the double bitterness of living constantly with death without having enjoyed an earlier era when sex was less associated with guilt and shame” . Moore reminds us that it is not healthy for the gay community to designate pre-AIDS as a time of “good gay sex” and our current era as a time of “bad gay sex.” In fact, for the gay community to have a healthy understanding of itself, the task is to reclaim “both the gay sexual past and AIDS as vital but separate histories” (p. xxvi). While Moore feels that it is essential that individual gay men as well as gay culture not feel any shame about the sexual culture that predated AIDS, he suggests that the shame about this history is still impacting gay men in terms of how they regard their own sexual desires and behaviors. For many, the freedoms, joys, and other benefits of the gay sexual culture that predated AIDS were overshadowed and even negated once the reality that AIDS was sexually transmitted became apparent. This resulted in many men trying to distance themselves from any associations with the rich pre-AIDS sexual culture, even at the cost of being embarrassed by and ashamed of their own attraction to aspects of it whether they lived it or not.

One young man illustrates the connections between barebacking and shame in an interview with Manhattan psychologist Alex Carballo- Dieguez (2001): I do understand the importance of barebacking in that it takes back a sense of personal freedom. It moves the sex you are having from the onus of shame and fear that an epidemic caused (fear of getting something, shame that society has put on us for having gotten diseases this way). Not using the condom steps toward that earlier time when we were enjoying each other’s intimacy and shared physicality.